


a bright, friendly place

by I_reallyreally_hatemakingusernames



Category: Twilight Series - All Media Types
Genre: Fluff, Gen, also emily and sam DO have a dog they named after sam's grandpa, also no imprinting, just emily being a surrogate older sister for kim, or horrible scars, seriously i cannot emphasize enough how much this is just fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-16
Updated: 2021-03-16
Packaged: 2021-03-25 08:26:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,610
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30086241
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/I_reallyreally_hatemakingusernames/pseuds/I_reallyreally_hatemakingusernames
Summary: The walk from school to Emily's house is always Kim's favorite part of the day--up until she gets to Emily's house.A small slice of life of the wolf girls hanging out while the pack is away, featuring learning to drive stick, grocery shopping, The Little Mermaid, and the value of the family we choose for ourselves.
Relationships: Emily Young & Kim Connweller, Jared Cameron/Kim Connweller, Sam Uley/Emily Young
Kudos: 8





	a bright, friendly place

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by a post by the lovely @howlonghaveyoubeenseventeen on tumblr. Enjoy!

The walk from the school to Emily’s house is always Kim’s favorite part of her day.

There’s the freedom of it—her legs instantly lighter, backpack bouncing like a pardon instead of a death sentence, and the epic sense of exploding out of the rusty doors into the wide-open stretch of the sky and the roar of the sea. There’s the days when it’s sunny, and just stepping outside and breathing in feels like she’s made it to an entirely different world. There’s the days when it’s raining, and she feels the spray of it cold on her face as she fumbles with her poncho, waking her up like nothing else, and she can skip and splash through puddles all she wants, knowing that as soon as she gets there, Em will be waiting with a mug of hot chocolate and a dry pair of socks, her smile not exasperated like Kim’s aunt’s always is, just knowing—

And even on days like today, when it’s just cloudy, no real rain to speak of, she can still tip her head back and search for the sun in the silver, and trail her hands over the tree branches as she goes, making her own rain, and be content with the feeling of going _home_.

* * *

“Em, I’m back!”

The blue door clatters merrily shut behind her as Kim toes off her shoes, over the quiet rippling of the little seaglass wind chime on the porch that she can never resist setting into motion. The air is dancing warm and sweet, just like always—pumpkin bread, probably?—Levi’s bark booms out from the backyard, and the living-room radio is meandering quiet, bluesy guitar through the house.

“In here!” Emily’s voice rings out of the living room too, and Kim shakes herself into motion, dropping her backpack under the rack of jumbled coats and leaning around the doorframe into the living room.

And for a moment, like always, she’s struck with how _beautiful_ Em is.

She’s at her loom, just under the window, and the little bit of silver sun is making her face glow soft and elegant, shining along the lines of her swept-up hair, the graceful arc of her neck, the careful, quick way her hands move over the strings—

And then she looks up, and smiles, her eyes crinkling at the edges, and Kim falls easily into grinning back.

“I love that jacket!” Em says, and pride sizzles through Kim—she spent _weeks_ on this one, an old jean jacket that she’d found helping the pack help Jacob finish cleaning out some of the rooms at the Black house. She’d stitched all of the flowers—pinks and yellows and whites—herself, and even managed to bead some of them.

“I did the back too,” she says, spinning to show Emily—more flowers, blooming neatly down the seams, and a butterfly spreading its wings in full color in the middle—and Emily gasps.

“Kim, that’s amazing!”

“Thanks,” she says, finishing her spin almost giddy—wanders closer to Emily, perching on the back of the armchair next to her. “What are you working on?”

Emily grimaces. “I’ve been trying to figure out how to make a wolf.”

Kim giggles—Emily plants a hand over her eyes and sighs. “I _know_ , but I was watching Sam run the other day, and I—”

Now Kim is laughing even harder, and Emily drags her hand off her eyes to wack her lightly on the knee. “You can’t tell me you’ve never tried to put a wolf pattern on anything! I know for a _fact_ you’re the one who sewed Jared that werewolf patch.”

“I didn’t sew that,” Kim protests, throwing her hands up in surrender. “I _bought_ it, because it was hilarious.”

“Fine, fine.” Emily rolls her eyes—but her voice is warm, and she’s smiling as she goes back to the weaving. “Maybe it is a _little_ bit funny.”

“Thank you,” Kim says, tossing back her shoulders and trying to look dignified. “For acknowledging my _outstanding_ sense of humor.”

“Oh, now you _really_ sound like Jared,” Emily groans, and Kim cracks up all over again—trying to ignore the way heat still flutters in her stomach every time someone says something that actually acknowledges that Jared _picked her_. That they’re really together…

“I’ll be at a good point to surrender in a minute here,” Emily says, when they’re both done giggling. “We can head to the grocery store after that, if that’s okay?”

“Yep! As long as—”

“Not a chance, Kim. You’re driving.” Kim groans, and lets herself melt down into the seat of the chair, flopped.

“One of these days I’m gonna crash your car,” she mumbles into the cushion.

Emily just laughs.

* * *

Five stop signs in, Kim has only stalled the little blue car twice—which is, compared to how this usually goes, _very_ good.

“Okay,” Emily says as they shudder to a halt at the sixth one—Ateara's in sight just across the road. “Just think about doing it _evenly_. Let out the clutch at the same time as you push the gas—”

Kim panics a little, slamming down on the gas—the engine roars, the car lurches—but they grind through it, and then they’re sailing forward, into the parking lot. Emily cheers—it’s undercut slightly by how hard she is clinging to the handle over the window when Kim glances at her, but she can’t help grinning anyways.

The only other car at the store is Joy Ateara's, tucked around the side in the dirt employee lot, so Kim coasts straight into a parking spot, squarely between the lines. She eases the clutch back in, stomps on the brake exactly the right amount, and—

“Ta-da!” she exclaims, flourishing the key at Emily.

“Good job,” Emily laughs, grabbing it and offering her a high-five. “I’ll drive us back. You’ve earned it.”

“Oh thank _fuck_ ,” Kim sighs—and then she unbuckles her seatbelt, and scrambles out of the car, booking it for the doors while Emily is still gasping. Not swearing often makes it _way_ more fun to choose her moment.

The bell over the door jangles as she hops in, and Mrs. Ateara glances up from behind the counter. “Hey Kim! You here with Emily again?”

“Yep!” Kim can tell she’s grinning a little too hard—Mrs. Ateara is squinting—so she tugs her jacket back into place and tries to smooth her face into something a little more dignified. “She’s just grabbing the grocery bags.”

“Well,” Mrs. Ateara says. “I won’t keep you then. But give your aunt my best! I haven’t seen her around recently.”

“Oh—yeah, she found a job in Forks, so she’s just been shopping there on her way home now.” Kim grabs a basket, tucking it over her arm.

“Ah. Well, tell her congratulations for me!”

Kim nods, about to say she will, when the bell jingles again—she glances over her shoulder, and grins as Emily rolls her eyes.

“Hey there, Emily!”

“Hi, Joy!” Emily dumps her shopping bags into Kim’s basket, and holds out her neat list with raised eyebrows. Kim flashes a thumbs-up as she grabs it, leaving Emily to head for the counter and a quieter conversation.

Kim splits off into the shelves—Christina Aguilera is playing, and she starts humming along, trailing her fingers along the price labels. Emily’s handwriting is neat, and Kim knows the organization of the aisles by heart—the clean smell and flickering lights over the metal shelves is familiar all the way back to when she was barely tall enough to tug on her aunt’s hand, toddling along in bright-pink light-up sneakers that were always on the wrong feet—so it doesn’t take her long to find everything. She does fill one basket, and have to deposit it on the counter and grab another one, but that’s par for the course, with the sheer amount of _stuff_ they buy.

On the really big grocery trips, they enlist the boys and Leah, pile everyone into Paul’s truck and head in to Forks so they don’t clean out the store. Everyone chips in for the price and the carrying—Jared always claims he can carry as many grocery bags as Paul, and _always_ drops something.

“That everything for you two?” Mrs. Ateara asks when she makes it back with the second basket—interrupting a conversation she _thinks_ is about volunteering at the Teen Center—and Kim nods.

Despite how long it took her to gather them, Mrs. Ateara rings up the groceries at alarming speed. She also firmly refuses to back down from giving them the employee discount—“I know at least half of this is going towards feeding my son,” she says, waving down Emily’s protests—and sends them out the door with one last cheery reminder for Kim to say hi to her aunt.

* * *

“What’s the past tense of _lie_?” Kim asks, scrunching further down onto the couch. Emily looks up from her Agatha Christie novel.

“Lie as in deception, or lie as in someone lying down?”

“Someone lying down.”

Emily blinks. “I think it’s lay.”

“Thanks.” Kim fills in the appropriate blank on the worksheet—then looks at the paragraph stretching on and sighs, the urge to toss the packet into the air and run swelling. Emily’s eyes stay on her—Kim can almost _feel_ her smiling, trying to bite it back down like she always does.

“Is that due tomorrow?” she asks finally—and Kim can _definitely_ hear the smile in that.

“Not until Monday,” she answers—and then Emily is hopping out of her chair with a creak.

“Excellent. Come on, we’re making popcorn and turning on The Little Mermaid before the boys get back.”

“Really? I finally convinced you to watch it?!” Kim scrambles to her feet, cramming the packet hastily back into her bag.

“Yes, you win,” Emily laughs, nudging Levi out of her way as she edges across the hallway and into the kitchen. “My poor mother’s anti-Disney legacy has been overthrown.”

“Yes!” Kim scrambles after her—getting caught halfway by Levi, who butts his head hopefully into her knees. She pauses, burying her hands in his golden fur and scratching, and his tongue lolls out happily. “I know it’s a kid’s movie, but the music is _so good_ , and—”

“I know, the music is good and the animation is beautiful and it’s bound to be a classic forever.” Emily rocks back onto her heels with the jar of popcorn kernels, easing the cupboard closed, and winks. “I’m already sold. Get in here and hand me that pot, would you?”

* * *

They finish the movie—and Leah and the boys still aren’t home.

It’s dark—past dark, the eerie type of it where the clouds hide all the stars, and their gray turns the night a bit lighter than it could’ve been, but _off_ somehow. The rain has started—Kim can hear it, over the rolling music of the credits, pattering down against the roof and rushing through the gutters. It could almost be cozy, if not for…

She glances over at Emily, biting her lip—her face is cast in shadows now, harder to read in just the flickering light from the TV, but she still looks calm, leaning down to the coffee table to rummage for the remote, next to the bowl of popcorn.

“Em?”

She straightens back up, looking over—and now Kim can see it in her eyes, the same worry that’s humming down to the tips of Kim’s toes. She can’t hold her gaze all of a sudden, so she glances down, picking at the tasseled ends of the blanket that Emily dug out for them when the rain started and the temperature in the little house slid down.

“How do you deal with...this?”

“Oh, Kim.” Emily leans back in, and wraps an arm around her—Kim lets her head settle onto Emily’s shoulder, and lets her eyes flutter closed. For a second, she just breathes, following the quiet pattern of Emily’s inhales, listening to the thumping of her heart. For a second, it’s just—quiet. Just the two of them, breathing in time, borrowing each other’s warmth as they wait for their boys.

For a second, just being _here_ —breathing in the sweet smell that follows Emily around as surely as it hangs around her house, feeling her hair soft on Kim’s cheek, the steadiness of her arm—Kim doesn’t even need the words to know it’ll be okay.

But Emily gives them anyways.

“I trust them. I trust Sam to want to come home, to take this seriously. I trust them to help each other. And...I know that there’s a reason. This power that they have...it goes all the way back to our stories. It’s kept us all safe for thousands and thousands of years. And I trust that too.”

She squeezes her shoulder again.

“They’re going to be okay.”

And then Levi _woofs_ , and his paws are digging into Kim’s calves, and his cold nose is on her cheeks, snuffling at the tears, and Emily bursts out “Oh _Levi_ , not on the _couch_ ,” and their quiet moment dissolves into laughter—a little bit shaky, but _real_.

“Come on,” Emily says, when they’ve wrangled Levi back off their laps and made it to standing again. “Let’s make ourselves some real dinner. I’ll call your aunt and promise to drive you to school tomorrow if she lets you spend the night.”

* * *

They make macaroni and cheese—boxed and horrifically orange, but warm and still delicious—and eat it together in the kitchen with all the lights on, cheerfully debating whether Prince Eric is stupid or just face-blind, and the actual merits of eels as minions.

Kim finishes first, so she digs the dog food out of the cabinet, Levi thumping excitedly into the backs of her knees the entire time. She empties it into his bowl, then lets him out to crash around the backyard one last time before he comes in for the night, while Emily rinses the bowls and loads them into the dishwasher.

Emily lends her a pair of fleece pajama pants—truly horrible purple plaid—and then, without talking about why, she digs out the bin of spare clothes that they keep for the boys and Leah, and lets Kim go through it. They’re all jumbled together, but she presses her nose to the thin Star Wars T-shirt she picks and inhales anyways—there’s a hint of _Jared_ to it, she’s sure, under Emily’s familiar detergent and the deep _forest_ smell the pack’s clothes always carry.

She brushes her teeth with her finger, braids back her hair for the night, and tries not to see the worry still lingering in her own eyes, in the little bathroom mirror. And then she settles down on top of the tiny guest bed, in the room that’s slowly becoming more and more _hers_ , and realizes exactly how tired she is.

“I’ll wake you up when they get home,” Emily says from the doorway—her voice as soft as the orange glow washing out of her bedroom, the only light left in the little house.

“They’ll probably wake me up themselves,” Kim points out, and both of them laugh a little. When it abates—

“Thank you,” Kim says—and again, even in the dark, she can tell that Emily is smiling, small and fond.

“Of course,” she says, easing the door closed. “Good night, Kim.”

“Good night,” Kim whispers—and then she burrows under the quilt, listening the soft whirl of the rain, and letting it carry her off to warmer dreams.


End file.
